“I
cannot discover this oceanic feeling
in myself. It is difficult to deal scientifically with feelings. One can
attempt to describe their physiological
signs.”
In Civilisation and Its Discontents (better
translated as “the dis-ease or un-ease of Culture”), Freud blankly rejects the
suggestion by Romain Rolland that human beings are able to empathise, and
therefore to sym-pathise, with one another and with the world. In Schopenhauer
it is precisely this Mit-leid, this “shared pain” or literally “sym-pathy” that
allows the human understanding to become “reflectively” aware of the
insatiability of the Will, of the evanescence of its “appetite”. The pleasure
(Lust) of the attainment of the goal of
the Will – its satis-faction – is also immediately the extinction of the pleasure, its ful-filment, its com-pletion which
also marks its “end”. The point of the Askesis then cannot be the Christian one
of “be mindful of mortality”, of “all things must pass” – because the real “negation”
of the “transience” of being, of the futility of “craving” and “seeking” is not
and cannot be “labor” – that is, the physical annihilation of the Body. Rather,
it must be the vanquishing and the quelling of the Will, of its aimless and
in-exhaustible “hunger” for pleasure and satisfaction – and consequently the “Pain”
(Leid) of this dis-enchantment.
It is
not and cannot be the “Labor”, then – the Arbeit – that can offer ab-solution,
relief and release from this “search”, from this “Strife”, this “Eris”. No. It
can and it must be the ab-straction from this “search”, this “pursuit” itself –
be it the “pursuit” of happiness or pleasure or profit! In this perspective, in
this “world-view”, the Arbeit or Labor are not and cannot be the “solution” to
the problem of existence: they can be and they are instead part and parcel of
that “problem”. Labor cannot be the source of any “Value”, of any summum bonum,
of any pleasure or “good”. As a means to an end – the obtaining of
gratification of “needs and desires” – Labor cannot be the “cause and source”
of Value; it can only be the “opposite” of Value. Labor cannot have a “utility”,
it can have only a “dis-utility”. “Value” is a property of “goods”, not of
Labor. And Labor is only a “means for “obtaining the goods”. Labor “works” its
Object; it “consumes” the Object so as to obtain its “objective”, what it “strives
for”, what it “wills”. It follows necessarily that Labor does not “create”
anything, it does not pro-duce anything, but that it merely “utilizes” what
exists already, its Object, and simply trans-forms it into something else to
ensure its survival and reproduction.
There
is no inter esse therefore between the labor-power of individual workers. What
brings the workers together, what permits and makes possible the “sociality” of
Labor is not Labor itself but rather the Object, the means of production – it is
Capital! By clinging to the idea of “Sym-Pathy”, of Mit-Leid, Schopenhauer is
piously and pathetic-ally
contradicting the entire inversion of the Hegelian “dialectic of
self-consciousness” that moves precisely from this “oceanic feeling” that
Freud, following Nietzsche, steadfastly denies in favour of “the Reality
Principle”, of the “conflict” between the Ego and the External World! Life is
Will to Life. Life is Conflict! No “mediation” is possible: no Dialectic! And
Capital represents the primacy – the supremacy, the domination! – of the Object
over the Subject, of Property over Sym-Pathy, of Capital over Labor.
Foolish
to believe that human beings can “create” Value: the first principle of physics
is that nothing is created and everything is trans-formed! Labor quite simply
trans-forms the Value that exists already and emanates from the Object into
something that can satisfy and fulfil its “need”, its “necessity”. The “ideality”
of human activity – what presumably originates and constitutes its pro-duction
is only a “feeling” which is inscrutable and therefore incapable of “scientific”
verification: all we can “see” or “experience” are its “sensations”, its “physiological
signs”! Freud here completes with Viennese logic the scientific theories of his
Viennese contemporary – the great philosopher of science and scientist, Ernst
Mach.
(To
be continued)
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